\'Dreams for Dead Bodies\' traces the lineage of the genre of detective fiction back to unexpected texts: experimental works on the margins of what we recognise as classical detective fiction today. It shows that authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Rudolph Fisher drew on detective fiction\'s puzzle-elements to wrestle with complicated questions about race and labour in the United States, such that the emergence of detective fiction is itself bound to a history of interracial conflicts and labour struggles. As new.